Etty (Tika) Benveniste (b. 1956), Alma B. Maxwell UAHSF Endowed Chair; and Professor and Chairman of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology, received her Ph.D. in 1983 from UCLA in the field of immunology. During her postdoctoral studies in the Department of Neurology at UCLA, she initiated research which has continued up to this time, on elucidating the mechanisms underlying cytokine/chemokine production by glial cells, and the effects of cytokines/chemokines on glial cell function. Dr. Benveniste has served as the Director, Graduate Program in Cell Biology and as Associate Dean, Office of Postdoctoral Education. She became Chairman of the Cell Biology Department in 2000, Associate Director, Basic Science Research, Comprehensive Cancer Center, in 2006, and Chairman of the newly formed department of CDIB in 2012.

Research/Clinical Interest

Title

Immune/nervous system interactions

Description

Dr. Benveniste's research is directed toward understanding how the immune system and central nervous system (CNS) communicate with each other. Specifically, her laboratory is studying the function of shared cytokines/chemokines between cells of the immune and nervous systems. Astrocytes and microglia, the major glial cells of the CNS, have been shown to act as antigen-presenting cells in the CNS. Dr. Benveniste’s group is examining the mechanisms by which cytokines modulate class II major histocompatibility complex (MHC) and CD40 proteins on these cells, with a particular emphasis on delineating the transcriptional machinery that drives expression of these genes. The ability of astrocytes and microglia to secrete several immunoregulatory molecules (tumor necrosis factor, interleukin-6, macrophage chemotactic protein-1, interleukin-8) is also being studied, with an emphasis on the biological stimuli that induce these cytokines/chemokines, intracellular signaling events involved in the response, and the molecular mechanisms of gene regulation. These projects will provide a better understanding of how bidirectional communication occurs between the immune and nervous systems, and how these interactions affect the functionality of glial cells. These studies are also relevant to understanding the pathogenesis of several neurologic diseases such as multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease of the CNS, and HIV-1 associated dementia (HAD). Dr. Benveniste has also initiated studies to examine the role of MMPs and IL-8 in astroglioma migration and invasion, and how interferons inhibit these responses at the transcriptional level. In this line of research, her laboratory is examining how interferons inhibit MMP-9 and IL-8 gene expression by utilizing chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays to examine the MMP-9 and IL-8 promoters in vivo. Recent studies in the laboratory are focused on the aberrant activation of two signal transduction pathways in astrogliomas; the JAK-STAT pathway and the NF-kB pathway. It is thought that the dysregulation of these signal transduction pathways contributes to the invasiveness of brain tumors, as well as angiogenic properties. As such, the group is exploring the therapeutic potential of inhibitors of the JAK-STAT and NF-kB pathways to treat brain tumor patients.